I just got back from the launch party for Buy It Like You Mean It, a startup non-profit that is “enabling the socially conscious consumer”. I’m a big fan of what they are doing. As a free-market capitalist, I like to think that the power of markets can solve all kinds of problems. As […]

Catching up on email this Saturday, I got the opportunity to take a survey about my experience evaluating Bungee Connect. Evaluating bungee connect has been something that has popped onto my radar several times. They purport to be an application platform for web applications. They have their own language, their own ui toolkit, their […]

If you haven’t heard already, Steve Jobs is expected to announce on Monday that iTunes will begin offering 24-hour movie rental for $4. This is widely reported not just by traditional rumor sites, but by people like Salon. And, by and large, people have been complaining about the price. Including me. Digging deeper, I […]

A few weeks ago Bruce Schneier discovered a classic economics paper, “The Market for Lemons”. The paper describes the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have. It uses the example of used cars.
In these markets, the price buyers are willing […]

Just came across Phil Windley’s summary of the tutorial Coder to CoFounder at ETech by Marc Hedlund. I didn’t make it to ETech, so I can’t give any first-hand account, but even Phil’s summary is worth reading if you are interested in startups and trying to decide between being a founder and going to […]

I find the economics of enterprise software to be quite interesting, but have never had a theory of pricing that I really felt comfortable with. I’d like to present a new (to me) explanation for how price is deterimined.
Many people are uncomfortable with the concept of “enterprise software” as some how different from other software. […]

Had a few hours to kill in Midtown Manhattan today, and so took the opportunity to check out some retail that can only exist in New York.
First I went by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, which I like to call the Mother Church (standard mall Apple Stores being known as the iShrine). I hadn’t […]

Thursday at StreamBase we had a lunch talk by Steve Vinoski, Chief Engineer at Iona Software. Our CEO (Barry Morris) is former CEO of Iona, and he asked Steve to talk to use about Extreme Programming (XP). Iona switched to the extreme programming model nearly 10 years ago, and was the first large product company […]

In case people have forgotten, I work at a company I helped start called StreamBase that came out of my graduate research. The product is a stream processing engine, meaning it consumes and processes tens to hundreds of thousands of events per second, from sources like sensor networks, stock markets, or the global interweb, and […]

I dropped by MIT this weekend to check out the CalTech cannon hack. This is campus preview weekend, when admitted students are invited to visit the MIT campus to be wooed by admissions officials and current students alike. As a rule current students drop what they are doing to provide entertainment for themselves and occationally […]